Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Sombrero del Muerto!

We visited the in-laws in Bastrop over the weekend, and as a consequence of this, returned home with a copious amount of home-grown tomatoes. When they offered these to me, I jumped at them--it's been six months or more since I made salsa (my "brand" being Sombrero del Muerto), and I was getting pretty tired of the lame, store-bought stuff. So after making a grocery run to pick up the required chipotles, jalapenos, serranos, habaneros and tomatillos for my recipe, last night I set to work cooking up a batch.

Turns out I had more tomatoes than usual, so the resulting salsa is somewhat more tomato-y than normal. And not quite as hot, since the extra tomato is diluting the Capsicum from the peppers. But still. Prior to adding the serranos and habaneros (and the majority of the jalapenos) I bottled up two quarts of "mild" salsa, which would correspond to Pace medium in terms of spicyness. Armed with a bag of chips, Calista dove into a bowl and pronounced it excellent stuff. Lisa opined that it wasn't bad. Then I added the fiery stuff to the remainder in the pot, and after simmering for 30 minutes or so, ended up with a little more than two gallons--most of which went into the freezer for future consumption.

I, of course, sampled a good bit myself. The tomato is a little over-balanced, and there's not quite enough cilantro in the mix. But other than that, it's good stuff, even if it's not as hot as I usually like it.